Last Bender

If a blogh is not a place to reveal ones deepest shame I don’t know what is. So I am going to confess that for a number of years in high school I was that most shameful thing of all, a Deadhead. I listened to Grateful Dead albums obsessively, I read books about them and [...]

NGUYEN COCHINCHINA SOUTHERN VIETNAM IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES By Li Tana Southeast Asia Program Publications Southeast Asia Program Cornell University Ithaca, NY 1998    http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/102893.htm http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonmachi Nguyen Cochinchina, Li Tana’s fascinating and vitally important book about the expansion of the Vietnamese into central and south Vietnam, addresses a period and place little [...]

Robert Kennedy in his Own Words The Unpublished Recollections of Robert Kennedy edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman Bantam Books, New York, 1988 “In my judgment, you would have accomplished much more if you had had a dictatorship during the period of time that President Kennedy was President, because you would have gotten [...]

The War At Home “I see the old men, all twisted and torn The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war And the young people ask me, what are they Marching for? And I ask myself the same question” Shane McGowan, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” The Vietnam Project has broad horizons and contains multitudes. [...]

  NIXONLAND By Rick Perlstein Scribner, New York 2008 NIXON (to an aide): “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or a [...]

  Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read [...]

  Hubert Humphrey A Biography By Carl Solberg 1984, Norton & Norton, New York Borealis Books edition, 2003  The Vietnam Project began with a simple desire to know what happened during the Vietnam War. By the time I got around to writing this blogh, to formalizing it as a ‘project’, my interest had run riot [...]

SOCIETY, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS IN PRE-ANGKOR CAMBODIA THE 7TH-8TH CENTURIES BY MICHAEL VICKERY The Centre For east Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco, the Toyo Bunko, 1998 Michael Vickery is foremost an historian of ancient Cambodia. But he has also written about modern Cambodia. He is a Marxist, and his writing has a strong polemical current [...]

The Birth of Vietnam By Keith Taylor Berkeley : University of California Press, c1982. xxi, 397 p. : maps ; 24 cm. http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Vietnam-Keith-Weller-Taylor/dp/0520074173 The Civilization of Angkor By Charles Higham London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001. xv, 192 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Angkor-Charles-Higham/dp/0520242181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262619216&sr=1-1 In my last South East Asia post I subjected the [...]

South East Asian Historiography Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s [...]